There is an inmate in one of the Russian insane asylums at present, a Jewish soldier who paces up and down his cell, continually groaning: “Shmah Yisroel.” His story is simple. One night lying in the trenches on the Prussian frontier, he observed an approaching grey figure, obviously that of a German soldier. When the figure came close to the trenches, the Jew leaped upon his foe and pierced him with the bayonet. The German fell, moaning in agony: “Shmah Yisroel.” The two words have been haunting the Russian since, until, they say, he lost his reason.
It is a grave symptom for the Jews, when they begin to lose their reason under the stress of tragedy; their very existence as a people is imperiled, as soon as they show signs of normality, and fail to endure grief and suffering. For what has kept the Eternal Ahasver so wonderfully alive these two thousand years but his philosophical defiance of seeming reality? “Shmah Yisroel,” “Hear, o Israel, the Eternal is our God, the Lord is one,” has been the motto of the nation through the long centuries of persecution, the pillar of fire on its historical Golgotha; it has become the symbol of Judaism, the coat-of-arms of the “Chosen People” who were destined to wander among gentiles, to teach them the living word, and to be rewarded for the instruction with hatred and contempt.
“Shmah Yisroel” were the last defiant words of the Palestinian martyrs, when tortured to death by the Syrian Hellenizers of the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, who attempted the apparently easy task of annihilating Judaism by the force of his mighty legions. “Shmah Yisroel” cheerfully cried the Rabbis enwrapped in the scrolls of the Law, set afire by the order of Emperor Adrian, “and their souls returned in purity to their Creator,” relates the Agadah. “Shmah Yisroel” was the cry that thundered amidst the blaze of the Auto-da-Fe set up by the Spanish Inquisition ad maiorem Dei gloriam. Throughout the ages, humiliated and offended, but inwardly proud, despising and forgiving those “who knew not what they were doing,” the Jew marched his endless road with his Motto as a talisman, as an invulnerable shield. Recently, during the first decade of the twentieth century, the world heard once more the cries of “Shmah Yisroel” piercing the air of Russia from end to end, when Jewish men, women and children were slaughtered by governmental hooligans in order to quench with the blood of Israel the Revolution.
Neither is the present great trial new for the indestructible people: many battles have been fought, with Jews taking part on both sides. There is a popular print in Germany, presenting the Jews of the Kronprinz’s regiment praying on the day of Atonement before Sedan; a grotesque mass of warriors entreating the Lord of peace to grant the world eternal peace. What greater incongruity can be imagined than Jews exterminating one another; what more terrible absurdity, than the descendants of the prophets waging war, the descendants of Isaiah who was the first to preach to the nations “to beat their swords into ploughshares”! Yet the life of Israel in the last two thousand years has been a continuous incongruity, an anomaly, a miracle; will this nation collapse under the tragicness of the present situation?
The Russian-Jewish soldier who lost his reason, because he failed to understand the “Why” of his having killed his brother, a German-Jewish soldier, is a grave symptom for the abnormal, supernormal people. Has “Shmah Yisroel” ceased to serve as the all-answering formula, as the justification of the impossible reality, as the invincible watch-word, as the great stimulus to live on, to march on, ever forward, into the unknown future?
Bestialization
The other day I received a deserved blow. A letter from the war-zone reached me. Nothing but the handwriting told me that it was written by an old friend of mine, a poet of exquisite sonnets—so rude was the style, so dry and matter-of-fact the tone of my erstwhile elegant correspondent. She cynically derided my glorification of the war as Europe’s healthful purgatory, and spoke of death and want, cruel prosaic want. Do we ever realize the actual stultifying, bestializing conditions of the non-combatants under whizzing shells and roving aeroplanes? We, the calm philosophizers, the curious spectators and speculators? Do we, neutrals, envisage Death and Murder raging in a bacchanale over the embroiled lands? Of all the war poems and sermons it was only Eunice Tietjens who perceived the trans-Atlantic horrors in her prophetic Children of War; the rest are cold, labored writings. Perhaps our American diplomats, who are anything but diplomatic, will innocently involve this country in the world mess, and our authors will be given a fair test.
Ibn Gabinol.
New York Letter
George Soule